Take a Haircut

image

By now you know that you need to get your product launched as quickly as possible. It’s easy to postpone the launch, and convince yourself that a polished product will generate more sales. But the more features you add, the longer it will take to launch, and the more time required to determine feasibility. Launching quickly will give you the feedback you need to iterate and improve on your initial idea, which will help you create something that people will actually pay for.

A haircut is a great way to boil down your product to only the most essential features. List all of the features you believe are necessary to launch, and eliminate at least half of them. Seriously. As impossible as this may sound, forcing yourself to eliminate features is the mentality you need to adopt to get to market quickly, win customers, drive revenue, and stay alive. Don’t get bent out of shape—you’re not killing the features forever. You’re only putting them on the back burner until customers ask for them. Imagine all of the time you’ll save, which can now be spent with customers, learning about the right direction to take the product.

icon

Previous | Chapter Contents | Next

Get The Agile Startup: Quick and Dirty Lessons Every Entrepreneur Should Know now with the O’Reilly learning platform.

O’Reilly members experience books, live events, courses curated by job role, and more from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers.